From HotAir.com

0: The number of unrehearsed, unscripted questions asked of President Obama during his “Town Hall” on health care reform.

13: The number of teeth that British veteran Ian Boynton pulled out himself with pliers “because he couldn’t find an NHS (National Health Service) dentist… [he] could not afford to go private for treatment so instead took the drastic action to remove 13 of his teeth that were giving him severe pain.”

14: The percentage of all patients in Britain who wait more than one (1) year to receive treatment after a referral by a general practitioner. Half of all National Health Care patients in Britain wait between 18 and 52 weeks for treatment.

37: The “health care ranking” assigned to the U.S. by the World Health Organization among the world’s countries. This oft-quoted number is used to justify an overhaul of the U.S. health care system and lists countries like Italy (2), Andorra (4), Malta (5), Singapore (6), Oman (8), Portugal (12), Greece (14), the United Kingdom (18), Ireland (19), Columbia (22), Cyprus (24), Saudi Arabia (26), the UAE (27), Morocco (29), Canada (30), Chile (33), the Dominican Republic (35) and Costa Rica (36) ahead of the U.S. Considering that noU.S. citizens travel to these countries when experiencing a life-threatening situation, it’s worth questioning the methods by which the WHO arrived at these rankings. Their criteria included subjective and political assessments such as “Fairness in financial contribution“. Suffice it to say that the WHO’s rankings are clearly fraudulent and are designed to influence U.S. policy.

60: Average cancer survival rate (all types) for patients in the United States. Canada’s survival rate is significantly lower at 55%, while Europe’s is a dismal 48%.

81: Average percentage of those who survive a diagnosis of prostate cancer in the United States versus 43% in Britain under their National Health Service.

90: Number of days, on average, each Canadian patient must wait for an MRI under the Canadian government-run health care system.

750: The estimated number of people waiting in line (in the pouring rain) at Britain’s Bury Office attempting to register for dental care.

2050: By this year, “Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (health care for the poor) will consume nearly the entire federal budget.” And by 2082, Medicare spending alone will consume the entire federal budget. This trajectory is, quite obviously, unsustainable for our children and our grandchildren. Congress is bequeathing our descendents a bankrupt health care system — for just the third of the medical system that the government already runs!

10,000: Number of Canadian breast cancer patients to file a class action lawsuit against Quebec’s hospitals because, on average, they were forced to wait 60 days to begin post-operative radiation treatments.

280,392: The number of jobs that employers would shed if government levied an employer mandate, requiring them to insure all employees. A 2007 study by Katherine Baicker of Harvard University and Helen Levy of the University of Michigan (“Employer Health Insurance Mandates and the Risk of Unemployment“) found that “0.2 percent of all full-time workers and 1.4 percent of uninsured full-time workers would lose their jobs if a health insurance mandate were written into law. Workers who would lose their jobs are disproportionately likely to be high school dropouts, minority, and female.”

443,849: The number of British patients of the National Healthcare Service (NHS) who waited four or more weeks for inpatient admittance into a hospital (Excel file) in May of 2009 (more than 75% of all patients).

1,500,000: The number of Canadians who do not have — and cannot find — a general practitioner/primary care physician due to shortages in medical staff: “In Norwood, Ontario,20/20 videotaped a town clerk pulling the names of the lucky winners out of alottery box. The losers must wait to see a doctor… Shirley Healy, like many sick Canadians, came to America for surgery. Her doctor in British Columbia told her she had only a few weeks to live because a blocked artery kept her from digesting food. Yet Canadian officials called her surgery ‘elective.’ …’The only thing elective about this surgery was I elected to live,’ she said.”

12,000,000: number of illegal immigrants who would qualify for free health care and — in all likelihood — additional health care rights for relatives under the Democrats’ universal health care plan, according to a reported statement by the office of Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and spokespeople for the racial separatist group La Raza.

$311,000,000 ($311 million): The amount of additional funding requested last month by the Obama administration simply to combat Medicare fraud. Medicare fraud is estimated at $60 billion annually.

$3,600,000,000 ($3.6 billion): The amount of added malpractice insurance costs to the current health care system instigated by an out-of-control trial lawyer lobby that donates heavily to Democrat causes.

$10,000,000,000 ($10 billion): The estimated amount of Medicaid fraud, based upon FBI estimates. Criminal practices include billing for nonexistent, overstated, or unnecessary services, kickbacks to patients, inflated costs, etc.

$60,000,000,000 ($60 billion): The estimated annual amount of Medicare fraud, due to widespread criminal operations that victimize taxpayers and specialize in dead doctors, fake patients, non-existent treatments and the like.

$107,000,000,000,000 ($107 trillion): The estimated shortfall of the Medicare and Social Security programs, which are utterly and completely bankrupt; they can be legitimately called an “enormous version of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme”.

Canada and England don’t pay as high a price for their health care because they freeload on American innovation. If we utilized their systems, Americans might worry less about paying for health care, but we’d get 2009-level care and long lines. Those are the immutable laws of supply and demand. Government monopolies don’t innovate. Only the free market innovates.

Furthermore, government bureaucrats already raped the Social Security Trust Fund — there is no trust fund. They raped the Medicare Trust Fund — there’s nothing left. They raped the Highway Trust Fund — it’s empty. I could go down a long list of things the government said it would do, but hasn’t done. Because the big government statists are liars. They even moved these massive expenditures “off the books” to conceal the damage they’ve done.

And now the Democrat Party, the union bosses and the trial lawyers are launching the most massive attack on the American people in the history of government.

They promise health care for everyone, but they will not — and they can’t possibly — deliver it. The numbers don’t lie.

References: Sick in America: ‘Free’ Is Good? (ABC News), There’s no such thing as free health care (Reason Magazine), Social Security and Medicare Projections: 2009 (National Center for Policy Analysis), Who is Debby Smith?, E.R. P.R., Bureau of Labor Statistics, July 2009.

by Timothy P. Carney, Washington Examiner

Democrats pushing for a health-care overhaul today say they’ve learned their lessons from the failure of HillaryCare in 1993: This time they are ready to fight back against the HMOs, and to take on “Harry & Louise,” the fictional couple that insurance companies used in TV ads opposing HillaryCare.

Alternatively, other Democrats say they’ve learned their lesson, and this time they’re sitting down with the HMOs so that the Big Businesses doesn’t torpedo the reform as they did with Harry & Louise.

But this narrative of reformers-vs-Big Business was as false in 1993 as it is today. In both battles, Big Business has sided with Big Government, the pugnacious rhetoric of the pro-regulation side notwithstanding.

The HMOs in 1993 broke away from the smaller insurers, because the big guys knew HillaryCare would be profitable. Big Government would funnel customers into these HMOs more efficiently than the market would.

And today, the insurance industry and the drug industry, which have been at the table crafting the “reform,” stand to profit handsomely–at the expense of taxpayers and consumers–if the right plan becomes law.

Vice President Joe Biden unfurled the old wives tale during the presidential primaries to play up his toughness. “It really is going to take someone who is going to be able to take on the insurance industry. They spent $250 billion last time, with Harry and Louise, to poke holes in the Clinton plan. They’re going to spend half a trillion dollars this time.”

Many journalists, in contrast, like to note that the insurance industry has “matured,” and this time they aren’t battling reform as they did in 1993.

Both accounts are misleading. There never was uniform insurance industry opposition to HillaryCare. Insurers were split back then, and–as is often the case–the biggest businesses supported more government while their smaller competitors resisted regulation.

The dividing line ran between HMOs and smaller traditional insurers who provided “indemnity plans.” Most small-to-medium insurance companies didn’t have the networks and the talk of primary care physicians you hear today.

Sick people went to the doctor, and insurers shared the tab. But bigger insurers saw better profits by becoming Health Maintenance Organizations, with all the labyrinthine rules and networks we know today.

A May 1993 article from the New York Times describes the political dynamic during the HillaryCare debate. The HMOs–Prudential, Met Life, Cigna, Aetna, and Travelers–supported Hillary’s plan for government-created “health alliances,” which were, effectively government-run cartels through which all insurance would be purchased. Smaller insurers, meanwhile, got the bad rap for opposing a “reform” they knew would help their big competitors.

The Times paraphrased an independent investment analyst saying, “the insurers that already had a large foothold in the HMO business would benefit greatly from the administration’s plans to pay for insurance for the 37 million Americans who are now uninsured. In essence, the Government would pay tens of billions of dollars to create a huge new pool of customers for health insurers.”

Hillary’s plan divided the industry. The Times reported in 1993, “The five giants recently broke off from the Health Insurance Association of America [HIAA], their longtime trade group in Washington, to form their own organization, the Coalition for Managed Competition, which is closer to the administration thinking on most issues.” The HMO group’s very name reeks of government cartelization via “managed competition.”

It was the HIAA–the smaller, traditional, non-HMO insurers–that ran those Harry & Louise ads against HillaryCare. The HMOs? They hired former AFL-CIO lobbyist Karen Ignagni and worked with the Clintons for federally “managed competition.”

The industry’s schism has since healed, in part because so many small traditional insurers went out of business even without a nudge from Hillary. The reunited lobby, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), under Ignagni’s leadership, is supporting the key aspects of Senate Democrats’ plans.

For obvious reasons, AHIP likes the proposals to require all individuals to carry insurance and all employers to offer it. With those gifts in hand, it’s no sweat for them to support regulations forbidding price discrimination or the rejection of ill applicants–regulations, by the way, that would hurt smaller companies more than bigger ones.

AHIP is opposing Democrats on creating a robust “public option”–forcing insurers to compete against government–but otherwise the group is on board with “reformers,” just as the HMOs were on board 16 years ago.

It’s nice work these reformers have – getting credit for battling corporate while the biggest businesses provide air support.